November 17, 2009

After opening the dev channel Google Chrome this morning I noticed a change in the info on the home screen:

If you look closely at the bottom you'll see a message notifying you of Google Chrome support for both extensions and bookmark sync. These aren't technically new features, but it is interesting to note that the link provided for extensions goes to a Google hosted link which at the time of this writing is not a valid link:

With the rumors of the RSS feed extension for automatically detecting feeds in a web page being provided in the future as a default extension for Google Chrome this may be another sign that Google is ready to roll out full-fledged extension support, a feature which has been one of the main barriers to entry for hard-core Mozilla Firefox users.

November 11, 2009

I like a clipboard manager. As a programmer I find myself needing to be able to keep track of a history of copied texts and codes for pasting at any given time (yeah yeah, call me a copy/paste programmer if you must, it is the number one form of code reuse :-P ). Anyway, I have been using Ubuntu almost exclusively on my personal laptop and mostly I miss ClipX. On my work machines I use Windows XP, just haven't taken the leap to Ubuntu yet with my Windows driven work life, but I have a common toolset which includes the aforementioned clipboard manager.

ClipX is a bare-bones, no nonsense clipboard manager. It is small and simple and does exactly what I need: keeps a history of my clipboard and allows easy access to those entries. I miss that when using Ubuntu. For a while I was using KDE and it comes with the standard KDE version: Klipper. Gnome though comes with no such default and this is a bit disappointing to me.

I finally found Glipper. It was constructed for Gnome in the tradition of klipper and is simple to use.

It's in the repos so you can find it in Synaptic or simply execute a console command:

sudo apt-get install glipper

It will install and then you'll go looking for it, but you won't find it... anywhere. This is because it's an Applet that can be added to your panel. To get it to show up in my Add to Panel... dialog I actually had to log out and log back in... but then upon launching the add to panel dialog I found Clipboard Manager (or something similar, just start typing clip and you'll see it).

I have to uncheck the option in it's preferences (found by right-clicking the icon on your panel and selecting Preferences) for the mouse selection/middle click option, I have a bad habit of selecting things I don't need when using a mouse and for some reason it was adding all that stuff to the history as if I had copied it.